For the last 15 years, the Innsbrook Historical Society has been reconstructing structures from the surrounding area in search of a home. It started with a log cabin and a schoolhouse, and now they are nearing completion on a 19th century barn on the property. 

The barn was transported piece by piece from a farm in Marthasville to the site at Innsbrook where it now stands, with some alterations. 

“They numbered all the pieces, brought them here and reassembled it,” said Society President David Boeckmann. “It’s the same wood that was used in the original back in 1870, the only difference is we’ve got a concrete foundation.”

While there have been some changes made to the structure, the society has been hard at work to ensure their final result is as close to the original as possible. Another change will be the addition of two 12-foot lean-tos on either side of the barn. 

According to Boeckmann, they were originally meant to be constructed with reclaimed barn wood but the society had difficulties finding suitable materials. Instead Boeckmann and his wife found a local sawmill to construct the materials they needed. 

“We really would have made that out of reclaimed wood, but we simply didn’t come up with any,” said Boeckmann. “This wood is probably better for the barn than if we had used reclaimed wood, because that bigger barn, … That’s a lot of weight, and so these lean-tos are new wood and they’re going to help support the inside.”

While work is slowly nearing completion, it has been a painstaking process since they first heard about the barn last spring. 

The first steps were to disassemble the barn at its original location so it could be moved. Volunteers for the society numbered each individual piece so that it could be reconstructed as close to its original form as possible. 

Bernie Cosby, a member of the historical society and retired engineer, was largely responsible for cataloging the pieces and directing the reconstruction. He said they were able to keep most of the barn but they had to make some changes to maintain its structural integrity. 

“They’re all post and beam, mortise and tenon joints, and we reassembled those the best we could, and we’ve made some changes,” Cosby said. 

One of those changes was removing part of the loft that originally ran the length of the barn. Roughly half of that loft was removed in part to conserve the structure and also to allow visitors to see more of the structure from the inside. 

The mortise and tenon joints that hold much of the structure follow a building technique that has been used for thousands of years. They involve cutting a hole, the mortise, into one piece of wood, and sawing down the end of another beam, the tenon, to be an exact fit, held in place by friction. 

There have been some modern building techniques used in the reconstruction as well, including a metal roof to help prevent water from reaching the aging wood and a cable that runs the width of the barn just below the roofline to keep the building from sagging. 

Aside from that metal roof on top of the barn and the concrete foundation, all of the work on the barn has been done by volunteers of the Innsbrook Historical Society. 

“We didn’t have our guys do the roof to the barn because it was just too high off the ground. It was just too dangerous, so we hired a contractor to do that. But other than the concrete and the roof, everything else was done by the volunteers,” said Boeckmann. 

While they received the barn in spring of 2023 and began moving it they were not able to start reconstructing it until March of this year, with crews only working six hours a week, three hours each day. 

“It’s the same cadre of guys that have been working together for over a year, and this is a labor of love for them,” said Boeckmann. 

As the barn’s construction nears completion, the society can start to plan ahead for more events. They hope to use the barn for concerts as they have held them on the property in the past, and now they have a more complete venue. 

They also have plans to invite school groups out to the property to learn about how people lived in the 19th century, when many of the buildings were originally constructed. 

“The whole purpose of the site, the whole purpose of the village, is just simply to restore a 19th century environment that people can come and look at and enjoy,” said Boeckmann. “To see what their ancestors did in terms of living space, and what their accommodations were like.”